Oh, Sleepy Head!

(Here I am with Kayla, enjoying my favorite passtime.)

Have you ever discovered that something you thought was really good, wasn’t? Until this morning I thought I had the gift of sleeping. For most people sleep is actually a natural occurrence not a unique gift but I’ve always given thanks for my incredible ability in this area.

I fall asleep within minutes of going to bed, nap every day for exactly twenty minutes and can sleep at any time, in any place, at will. Doesn’t that sound like a special power to you?

Well, it isn’t. It’s a disorder. A sleep disorder called sleep apnea. I went to bed last night at the Georgetown Sleep Center, an amazing facility owned by our good friends, Jim and Lisa Curlee.

I was wired. Literally. Multicolored wires taped to my scalp, dangling down my legs, monitors stuck to my back and chest, all feeding into a small box which recorded the details of the amount of oxygen in my blood, my heart rate, what stage of sleep I was in, and the pattern of my breathing. I failed the breathing part. I stopped breathing about 70 times an hour. This happens when a person has an obstructed airway. The result is that my brain had to arouse me to take a breath, over and over and over again. Seems I was so busy concentrating on breathing that I didn’t really sleep very well at all. (30 obstructions an hour is considered, severe sleep apnea.) So much for my ‘gift.’

I’m sure the Lord has another special gift for me, one that isn’t imagined to be good but is actually good. But I sort of hate to say good-bye to this life long friend—except that keeping this friendship substantially increases my risk of heart attack and stroke (and other bad stuff). So, I’m going to become the masked woman at bedtime, wearing a small device over my nose while a CPAP machine forces air into my airways. I’m supposed to feel a difference. The fact is, in the fifty years I’ve been living I may have never experience what it feels like to get a good night’s sleep; never known how it is to be well rested; am unaware of the true beauty of sleep. And all this time I thought I had a gift.

Life is like that. We can so easily be deceived to into thinking something is normal,

the way it’s meant to be, simply because it’s all we know and we’ve never experienced

anything different. In fact, our ‘normal’ may actually be abnormal. We may be

unaware of the negative affect certain behaviors have on our spiritual health.

Just because we were raised a certain way doesn’t mean it the best way to live in our adult lives. In fact, as believers, we’re supposed to adjust our behaviors to God’s word. He says things like, forgive, be patient, give a soft answer and speak the truth in love.

I want to do what He says, don’t you? So, I’m asking Him to test me, to probe with the sharp tip of His Word, and measure my reactions, and to reveal any areas that need attention. I want to be truly and totally spiritually whole, so that on that day when I go to sleep for the last time, I’ll wake up and find Jesus with open arms and a smile on His face and I’ll smile back, with no regrets.